The franc thing is on me - I didn’t get it from the limited context I got by skimming the excerpt. I still think pan-African currency is highly unlikely and that people generally pay disproportionate and misguided attention to “weakening” and “strengthening” of currencies.
As far as arming violent groups is concerned: Neighboring countries will have a strong motivation and tendency to intervene in one form or another in civil wars and other instances of substantive internal chaos - because the results often involve them directly, in the form of fleeing refugees or trans-border violence. Preventing and mitigating this mess is kind of a basic existential responsibility of a state towards its own citizens.
These interventions may be more or less wise, justified or competently executed. France in particular has a pretty shady history of attempts to shape the situation in Africa to its benefit and I’m sure a lot of their efforts have turned sour, particularly for the civilians on the ground who had no say in any of it.
The problem I have with this line of criticism is that the West is selectively targeted for something all interested parties do - and are to a degree obligated to do - and that the criticism is ever shifting and completely unrelenting and unforgiving, no matter the intentions and outcome:
- Send in troops to prevent ethnic cleansing? Invasion! Those soldiers kill people! That massacre that was prevented? What massacre? It didn’t happen, so what am I to appreciate about it?
- Don’t send troops? Why was the world silent and stood idly by when the Tutsi were massacred by the Hutu? Where is our commitment to our shared humanity? Just so much empty talk with no one willing to take action when one is needed!
- Try to stay mostly out of it and just indirectly aid the side that seems either the least unsavory or most likely to produce an acceptable status quo? You are arming extremist militant groups which wreak havoc and terror across the continent!
It’s not that the criticism is unwarranted in principle - there are many, many horrendous blunders with catastrophic consequences which positively need to be called out. It’s that this criticism from the Chomskyist left has lost any constructive value and has devolved into substance-independent virtue signaling over greater personal wokeness on Western imperialism, abdicating on any actual responsibility for practical foreign policy.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario: A despotic ruler of an African country has been in power for a decade or so, advancing and privileging his own tribal/ethnic/religious power base at the expense of other groups, as you traditionally do in societies based on extended family relationships and blood feuds. This has necessitated a brutal repressive apparatus, kidnapping, torturing and murdering anyone mildly suspected of dissent. This crystallizes further dissent and creates a situation in which all the suppressed groups are just silently waiting for the first sign of weakness to overthrow the tyrant and exact their vengeance.
Then a Schelling event happens, signalling to all the waiting parties that the opportunity is here (oil prices collapse, there’s an attempted palace coup, someone dies, a major power invades the region…) Sparks fly, blood is spilled and the rebellion gains traction. Civil war is inevitable, as everyone has been sharpening their daggers for years, the only question being who comes out on top.
So what do you do as a neighboring country likely to be hit by whatever shrapnels come flying out of the wreck? It’s often corrupt despot v. religious fanatics, with some racial and sectarian tensions on the side, so no obvious partners to back. But there are civilians in the middle of it, refugees coming out of it and it’s disrupting the flow of basic resources your economy absolutely needs. So you intervene and get Libya. Or you don’t intervene and get Rwanda. Or you intervene too late and too little and get Syria. What you definitely get, no matter what, is unrelenting criticism, often from the same people, for the entire spectrum of available options.
